Within the framework of Kyiv Perennial, the title of the Berlin edition of the pan-European 5th Kyiv Biennial, we warmly invite you to the panel discussion “Decolonizing Eastern Europe” with scholars and artists Epp Annus, Franziska Davies and Darya Tsymbalyuk, moderated by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Artistic Director of Kyiv Perennial and director of Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC). 

Shifting the focus of decolonial discourse from West to East, this panel looks at Eastern Europe’s pitfalls in the post-Soviet/socialist context. The panelists will discuss the Russian Empire and the USSR with regard to Ukraine and non-Russian communities still living within the Russian Federation, and how the Russian-centric view of Eastern Europe contributed to an underestimation of the destructive potential of Russian imperialism. Different meanings, similarities, and intertwinings of decolonization processes in the Ukrainian, Baltic, and Georgian contexts will be brought into focus, as well as the ways in which colonial violence affects the bodies of those under attack, and therefore, why decolonial work is embodied and experienced within bodies.

In English language

Epp Annus is Associate Professor at Tallinn University (Estonia) and she also lectures at Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018) and Coloniality, Nationality, Routledge, 2018). She has written or co-authored three monographs and several collective volumes in Estonian. She is currently finishing a manuscript, Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990 (under contract with Cambridge UP). In addition to her work as a scholar she has published two novels, some poetry, and several children’s books.

Franziska Davies is a historian of East and East Central Europe at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich who specializes in modern Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian history. A collection of essays she edited, Ukraine in Europe. Dreams and Trauma of a Nation, was recently published in Germany.

Darya Tsymbalyuk is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews and has received several awards for her work at the intersection of research and art. Her dissertation focused on stories and memories about people, plants, and geology, as well as displacement and Russian occupation and invasion in the east of Ukraine. Darya was a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2022-2023 and has an MA from Università degli Studi di Bergamo, the University of St Andrews, and L’Université de Perpignan via Domitia, and a BA from Kenyon College, OH, USA. She also works on the docufiction animation project Displaced Garden and co-founded the participatory art project Donbas Odyssey.